Archive for February, 2012

Last night my fiance had to listen to a drawn-out, passionate, window-shattering living room screed from Yours Truly because the sentence that is the title of this post, appeared on the teevee screen when I pressed “top menu.”

What…the…hell. It is twenty-twelve Anno Domini and you’d better believe the technology exists to serve up that menu. The disc is spun up and the right track has been located.

The wireless netbook was on the couch, ready to record my notes about 3D graphics rendering pipelines and assist me in my frantic browsing to Internet Movie Database to find out “where have I seen him/her before?” like usual…so yes, there was a Hello Kitty of Blogging post about it. Mostly an exercise of yelling into a rain barrel. (About four out of five of my Facebook tweets pass by into the ether with no replies at all — call it “the wall that nobody reads,” I s’pose.) But I was genuinely surprised at the response. Reminds me of when I was twelve, and found out WD-40 is actually flammable. Boom! Big ol’ stream of comments, except, contrary to historical trend, nobody uttered so much as a syllable of disagreement. Everybody “got it.” It’s our fucking teevee sets, DVD players, living rooms, batteries in the remote…we paid full price for all of it…how dare they.

All dudes, too. Hmmm…that is interesting. The gals don’t get pissed off when machines respond to the will of the manufacturer as opposed to the will of the user/customer, they see nothing amiss with that?

I think it’s more a case of, choosing the hill ya wanna die on. But the fellas — be fair to us — we are not confused about priorities, not in the least, not even a little bit. Line up a hundred people who are pissed off the DVD player is telling them no just because it’s been programmed to tell them no…from all sorts of economic situations, income brackets, geographic regions, educational profiles, ninety to ninety-five of them will be dudes…but all one hundred will be able to explain, coherently, why they’re pissed.

It’s got to do with what’s coming. I think men are like dogs who can hear a high-pitched whistle.

And it’s not fear of an imminent Terminator future in which the machines become self-aware and start eliminating humans.

It’s fear that our world is becoming a world of pussies. An Idiocracy. Who the hell pays top-dollar for a machine and builds his sacred lair around said machine…it’s like the heart of the heart of the heart of some James Bond villain’s inner sanctum or something, except comfier and more sacred, since there’s a coaster for the beverage by the command chair…and then acquiesces, meekly, as the machine, owned lock, stock & barrel by that person, proceeds to tell him, HAL-style, “Sorry Dave, I can’t do that” knowing full well that it can. Who tolerates this?

In the Picard era, the self-destruct device was used to illustrate the willingness with which the individuals would sacrifice their lives for the greater good. See, this is why Kirk beats Picard. Kirk was all about the triumph of the human will, ultimately, the triumph of the individual against chaos, misery, strife, insurmountable situations and impossible odds; Picard was all about subordination of that individual to the nebulous calling of the greater good.

We’re becoming a Picard society. Our Starship is Galaxy-class and it has a holodeck. We’ve spent a bit too much time in the holodeck, and in so doing we’ve diminished the experience. There are more channels from which we can choose, but we’re not doing the choosing anymore.

The irony is, that by placing a greater emphasis on our entertainment than previous generations did — than they were ever able to — we have, essentially, lost that medium. It’s no longer ours. I suspect this has always been true of recreation, of pleasant and idle diversions; as long as they remain in the periphery of a man’s life, of a society’s existence, they work well. Once they’re shoved into the limelight they become all about distraction, control and deceit, and lose the functionality they once had for their designated purpose.

Other than the foregoing, I don’t have too much of an opinion about it though.

When you think about this it makes perfect sense. Democrat power is built on dependency. As more people become dependent on government Democrats grow stronger; as more people become self-reliant Democrats grow weaker. Wouldn’t that make you proud to be a Democrat?

Spending of food stamps has almost doubled under Barack Obama’s administration. Meanwhile, the number of Americans earning pay checks has declined as the labor force has shrunk. This is nothing to be proud of. Productivity and earning — these are qualities to be proud of. Mooching and leaching — those are not qualities to boast about. America is not great because we have a growing class of moochers sucking on the government teat. America is great because of our individual pursuits in a private market place, which rewards hard work and talent.

I, on the other hand, don’t think we should be so judgmental. I say, the facts are in, let them stand but leave it to each individual — each voter — to decide the case for himself or herself…

Labor participation is way down and dropping.

Food stamp distribution is way up and climbing.

Supporters of the incumbent President say, that’s exactly what should be happening, and it seems the President Himself agrees.

Well there ya go. The lines are drawn: Dependency versus independence, sloth versus work, destitution versus prosperity, people waiting around to be fed versus people helping each other and reaping rewards from doing so…

The Pentagon said Monday that it will not change its “fundamental strategy” in Afghanistan despite a week of crises that have worsened the strained partnership between the Afghan government and U.S. and NATO forces.

U.S. officials acknowledged that tensions remain high in Kabul and that distrust has not dissipated since last weekend’s killing of two U.S. military officers inside the Afghan Interior Ministry, apparently by a rogue Afghan security officer.

The killings, which prompted Marine Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. and NATO commander, to pull service members from the ministries, have forced NATO advisers in Kabul to limit communication with Afghan government ministries to telephone and e-mail. U.S. officials said Monday that, although the measure is temporary, no date has been set for the advisers to return to work.

You know, it’s a funny thing about chestless policy decisions: It seems everyone forgets when they’re tried and they fail. I guess the expectation isn’t there. King Kong vs. Godzilla, you have to watch and see what happens, but Bambi vs. Godzilla follows a plot trajectory of “expect nothing and you won’t be disappointed.” At any rate, it is clear our leaders have gotten the message: Always do the tepid thing and you’ll have a long political life…just be a bureaucrat looking forward to the big fat pension, in charge of thousands of other bureaucrats looking forward to their big fat pensions, you’ll never be criticized. Not with any force or meaning anyway, and hey, that’s what it’s all about.

Blogger friend Rick brings us a clip of a certain presidential candidate who used to be the Speaker of the House…one who suffers, along with others among us, myself included, from the slings and arrows that are hurled in one’s direction when one dares to notice patterns of things.

It’s a bad pattern to be noticing, but it would be much worse to not notice it and allow it to continue.

Seems to me the United States is getting more enemies lately, and fewer friends, while it becomes more and more costly for other countries to be our friend, and less and less expensive for them to pick fights with us.

Therein lies the focus of where our foreign policy needs to go; it is the very idea that, all by itself, separates the policies of strong nations from the policies of weaker ones. President Freeberg would (before being run out of DC, probably tarred & feathered) make it a one-sentence pre-amble, on page one of said policy, all printed out in Microsoft Word & everything: The objective of this foreign policy, second to none other, is to increase the dividend, or at least diminish the cost, to other nations engaged with us in an amicable relationship, and impose a terrible cost upon those who choose to become our enemy.

Although I’m natural-born and over thirty-five, realistically, that probably isn’t going to happen. So as we hope for the next-best possibility, a mystery confronts us: What is up with all these Let Greedo Shoot First bureaucrats getting sworn in to the highest office in the land. Now that we know for a fact — we need not argue about it, it is a matter of historical record — that mediocrity and tepid responses from our leaders do nothing to diminish violence and bloodshed…and there’s such a craving for the opposite, long-lived as well as intense…why is it that the geldings win, seemingly, most of the time?

We do have an energized and passionate anti-war effort, it is true. And some of their intentions are admirable. What does it matter, though, if when they are privileged to choose our leaders for us, over the protests of the rest of us, the end result is indistinguishable from what would take place if they had no voice at all?

It seems a working functional long-term memory is a human ability monopolized by the hawkish, denied to the dovish. It seems, also, that perhaps that is what makes hawks hawks. Peaceniks cannot recognize patterns of things. History always began this morning in their world.

Do you remember when Barack Hussein Obama was running for president? He was positioned by his handlers and the Main Stream Media as “The Great Uniter”. He was going to bring us all together as one nation…under him.

Drawing a sharp contrast with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, his main rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama said in an interview that he has the capacity she may lack to unify the country and move it out of what he called “ideological gridlock.”

“I think it is fair to say that I believe I can bring the country together more effectively than she can,” Obama said…
:
Obama never used the term “polarizing” to describe Clinton but made it clear he has studied polls that show that many people have an unfavorable opinion of her. “I don’t think there is anybody in this race who’s able to bring new people into the process and break out of some of the ideological gridlock that we have as effectively as I can,” he said. [bold emphasis from KJ]

Well, that didn’t happen. In fact, America, under President Barack Hussein Obama, is more polarized than ever before.

Now, Obama and his Campaign have just announced the formation of “African Americans for Obama”.

The program urges black Americans to volunteer their time by making calls, organizing events and going door to door in their neighborhoods encouraging other African Americans to vote for Obama.

Not only is Obama playing the race card in an attempt to pressure black Americans into voting for him, he is also violating the separation between church and state. In the video promo for the campaign, Obama urges black people to pressure churches into supporting his administration by getting his message out via “the faith community”. He also calls on voters to become “congregation captains”.
:
“I thought race didn’t matter Mr. President?” asks Chad Hasty. “I don’t think MLK would be too pleased with you at all. African-Americans for Obama? Give me a break. Under this President, more blacks are unemployed. More blacks are on food stamps. If I had to bet though, Obama will still pull 93% of the black vote. Again, just a wild guess.”

As part of his efforts to lock down the black community as a voting bloc, Obama has arrived in Florida accompanied by an invasion of rappers and NBA basketball stars – all at taxpayer expense.

“The Great Uniter” has had quite a month. First, he attacked Freedom of Religion by issuing an edict that Catholic Hospitals had to provide contraceptives and the morning after abortion pill to patients desiring to use them.

Next, he and his Administration apologized to Karzai and the rest of the Muslims in Afghanistan for burning Korans which had been defaced already by Islamic Terrorists

And now, this.

I recall some other things from the 2008 election; I heard Obama supporters as well as Hillary Clinton supporters speaking of the urgent need to replace George W. Bush the most polarizing American President in recent memory, and put in place a reversal of the errant policies that had been put in place over the previous eight years.

Time to ask the question: Just how polarizing was President Bush, anyway?

You know, it says something about us that is not good when — well, if someone immigrated to our country and asked for an explanation about conservatives, liberals and libertarians, and the task fell to me to explain it to them, and someone put me on a strict limit as far as the number of words to use for my answer (and come to think of it, not a one among those three things is implausible)…I would have to say…

Alright, looking at it from a distant birds-eye view so I can put it in a single paragraph, let’s start with the conservatives and liberals, both of which believe in the sanctity of individual rights and that the government should not be able to interfere with those rights no matter how badly it wants to. But both sides have picked what kind of individual rights enjoy that durability, that level of protection, that the individual rights triumph over the calling for law and order. Conservatives, generally speaking, favor the individual rights that, by being exercised, help to make a society stronger and liberals generally favor the individual rights that make a society weaker. (A list optionally follows, which includes starting a business, employing people, home-schooling your kids, packing heat to protect your family in case someone attacks you…versus…getting acquitted during a criminal trial when you’re guilty as hell because the evidence is inadmissible.) Now, the libertarians generally side with the conservatives in all this, except they labor under the notion that using contraband recreational drugs falls into the “make society stronger” side…or, at least, their use does not make society any weaker.

There. That skips over a lot, like for example the liberals’ fondness for selective enforceability…you’ll notice there aren’t too many liberals campaigning, for example, for illegal things to be made legal, lately they offer a whole bunch of excuses about why some law should not be enforced. Don’t make it alright to break into a family’s house and steal their stuff, just ban guns because, aw gee, someone might get hurt. Don’t make a law requiring everyone to have the same share of assets or the same level of income…just reform the tax code SoThatMillionairesAndBillionairesPayTheirFairShare. Don’t legalize illegal immigration, just have a whole bunch of oopsies, darn we couldn’t keep ‘em out…oh well, now that they’re here, don’t legalize voting by illegal aliens, just…oopsie…we can’t ask for identification at the polling place because that would be racist. Oh my look at that, we have a whole bunch of brand-new votes for democrat politicians, how nice. So the conservatives and libertarians are arguing, by & large, about what laws we should and should not have. The liberals, on the other hand, expend their political energy toward reforming our culture, as opposed to our statutes…since they stand alone in doing this, they generally prevail here…and their arguments go toward what laws we should and should not bother to enforce. You’ll notice just about every time they argue for a new law to be placed on the books, that law has the effect of making some other law, already on the books, much harder to enforce. But, obviously, that gets into a second paragraph and thus would not be under discussion at that first dinner-table meeting. Which is a pity. But, priorities. The first paragraph gives us plenty enough to discuss before the cheesecake.

Well. Let us turn to the legalization of drugs, because with all the other stuff that’s going on, nobody says too much about it except the people who are all fired up about it, and the people who are all fired up about it are these libertarians who want them legalized. By and large, they don’t have opinions about too many other things, or at least they don’t have opinions that are equally passionate about too many other things. If I want a blog post to really catch fire, all I have to do is make it about 1) Sarah Palin, 2) Abortion or 3) legalizing drugs, and that’s not in order…it’s somewhat backwards…the legalize-drug crowd always has to have the last word, and the first one as well. So by now, we’ve all heard their arguments.

Time to hear the other side. Take it away Zo:

I live in a state where “assault weapons” are selected for illegalization by politicians who have no idea whatsoever what an assault weapon really is. I heard through the grapevine our senior Senator worked with the Clinton administration to ban selected firearms, at the federal level, by going through some gun catalogues and picking out what was most scary-looking. This, in spite of the fact that we have a constitutional amendment clearly spelling out that this should not be happening…

If someone has the time and passion to put together a response to Zo, and I consider this an inevitability, I expect them to spare an equal share of time and passion in defense of gun rights, if they want to keep a shred of conservative credibility with me. A gun, after all, is the ultimate device to be implemented in this always-unfinished task of ensuring good prevails over evil, and law and order prevail over chaos.

Santorum just had a Gingrich moment. Maybe that’s exactly what we’ve been needing to get this whole thing settled…

He’s right. You don’t have to go to college to contribute productively to the economy…and there are, in fact, some serious doubts lately about whether college enhances your ability to secure employment in a productive trade.

It certainly does enhance the likelihood you’ll be engaged in an unproductive one.

And a degree helps measurably. But that might be a temporary situation, if our President is saying the next thing we’re going to do is make sure we have lots more college grads. Same old mistake — you have more of something, each item of whatever-it-is loses value in the marketplace, since the commodity is no longer scarce, and our liberals are the last ones to figure it out.

Boy, do I ever feel sorry for the first class of “everyone” graduates. Yay, I got a diploma! We all do…now to get a job, by way of somehow distinguishing myself from the rest…of…these…people…who…have…what…I…have………………..

I remember in 2005 Danica Patrick placed fourth in the Indy 500. Some network engineers at work were talking excitedly about it, one of them female who I guess got the Monday water-cooler talk going…her bubbly enthusiasm about Ms. Patrick hanging in the air so thick you could cut it with a knife.

Which I did, I guess, when I asked “so am I understanding this right…there were three guys who did better?” Not the question to ask. Hey, I was genuinely curious, I mean the three dudes probably weighed more.

Oh there may have been a strain of hostility to it, or disapproval anyway. See, it isn’t that I don’t like Danica Patrick, what I don’t like is pandering. A guy races a car really fast, and it’s all…aw…so what. A woman does the same thing, doesn’t even place first even though she’s got an eighty-pound advantage over her competition, and you’d think she cured Cancer, then flew to the moon like Supergirl, rescued a bunch of astronauts who were trapped there, and while bringing ‘em back smashed a comet into smithereens that would have annihilated all terrestrial life. I find it to be, in an ironic way, rather sexist. Much like President Obama being “clean and articulate.” As in, we have to stop everything we’re doing, even if we personally don’t care that much about car racing, because hey this is a special event — chicks and blacks aren’t supposed to be able to do this stuff.

None of which really arouse any passion out of me one way or the other. But that’s the problem, you see. The paragraph above captures, and then explains nicely, every little remarkable thing about Danica Patrick: She races. Most gals don’t. Given that she races, since she’s a petite female, she ought to win and win consistently. Instead, she just places high on her good days, and then we’re all supposed to throw confetti and declare a new Danica Patrick day…

She enters the realm of the exceptional, and there’s more than circumstantial evidence that she doesn’t belong there, because chicks don’t race. Why don’t chicks race? I don’t know. Last weekend I was in a bar, and there was some kind of motocross event on the telly…now this is funny…big lineup, an international one, more than twenty guys racing. All guys. Every single last one. And what was the racing? Well, I thought it was interesting there was this straightaway that was built to rock the bike to-and-fro by means of the deep ruts in the track. In other words, there was a straightaway built to turn the seat of the bike into a jackhammer, pounding away at the guy’s testicles unless he used his legs to elevate his derriere. So a part of the track was developed specifically to abuse the guy’s junk. Just seems to me, you’d expect to see more gals racing. Some gals. Ladies don’t like to race. For being the one lady who’s willing to, or who’s had the opportunity to, whatever it is, Patrick is celebrated as exceptional when it seems there isn’t that much exceptional about her. I find that mildly annoying.

Well, she crosses into new territory of annoyance with me when she starts to complain about being treated like a sex symbol.

And then she was asked how she feels about Obama’s newest controversy with the contraceptive methods in the health plans, being a Roman Catholic herself. Her response:

“I leave it up to the government to make good decisions for Americans.”

Sorry, no two ways about it. The woman’s a moron.

And I must confess, as I get older and see more of what happens, I’m developing a special loathing for Catholics who lend their support to un-Catholic and anti-Catholic things. What I’m seeing play out here, I think, is a fondness for group-think, and for labels…an elevation of packaging over the importance of the substance within, with ramifications for the spiritual health and welfare of everyone under their influence, that are nothing short of tragic. I’m done run out of patience with it. How can you consider yourself a member of this religious order…over here…and then that public policy initiative over there…knowing the two are in irreconcilable conflict. I mean, it’s not just Republican propaganda, it’s cold hard fact.

When it’s your job to race cars at several times the legal speed limit, I expect you’d be concerned about stuff like, cause & effect, laws of the universe, et al. Yeah, that seems to be the problem…Danica Patrick wants to use her tits & ass to sell magazines and web hosting, then expect not to be a sex symbol. Cause and effect, she apparently has problems with it.

I’m coming to be aware lately of a recurring sequence of events within communities large & small. Said sequence begins with the plight of some smaller selection of the population within that community; people who…

1. Suffer a tragedy/setback
2. Become more acutely aware that they, by their existence & routine activities, are doing very little to fulfill others;

And as a result of that initiating event,

1. They want to have
2. Everybody else wants them to have

…one of the two following things, perhaps both of them…

1. Dictatorial control over the endeavors of the community as a whole
2. An unlimited share of the community resources

Read that last one not as “a larger share” or “an increased share”…but more of…an unlimited share. They, or others, want their concerns about exhausted supplies to just go away. Not to be addressed in a rational or sustainable way. Just make the concerns go away. Sort of like handing someone a blank check, except, when you really hand someone a blank check for whatever wants & needs they have in mind, they still have to do some math…this goes beyond that, it’s more like relieving the aggrieved party of the burdens of number theory itself, with all its attendant inconveniences. Think of Michelle Obama’s vacations, for example. Her living like royalty, for some reason, is a soothing tonic to others who do not get to live like that, only to watch her, and live vicariously through her — I guess.

Many years ago I compared the anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan to a character out of Atlas Shrugged who, like Sheehan, suffered or relished the status of bereaved mother (perhaps a little bit of both). The character from the novel, and the subplot that was defined around her, helps to illustrate the problem. See, this “Kip’s Ma” person lost her son, Kip, in the Taggart Tunnel disaster which is a game-changing event taking place about halfway through Part II of the three-part epic. The tunnel disaster is a halftime event meant to illustrate what happens when non-producing people tell producers how to produce, and the novel as a whole shows how we humans seem to be wired to make our own problems much worse than they were before, even as we toil away under the delusion that we’re trying to solve them.

The entire nation is sympathetic to the personal tragedy suffered by Kip’s Ma, who is never named, I think…she is given dictatorial control over agriculture, with a looming famine threatening. She decrees the problem is an over-reliance on wheat, and intones that the population should be fed by soybean instead, since that’s the way they do it in the Orient and they’re much smarter than we are, or something. Well, it ends up being a meaningless triviality whether or not the shift to soy would be a beneficial one, for you see, there are certain handling requirements that apply to soybeans that don’t apply to wheat. These are not accommodated, and as a result there are entire freight cars left to rot by the loading station while a population continues to starve.

So the problem we see with Kip’s Ma, as well as with these situations…there are three sets of two options apiece, two to the power of three is eight, so this is eight different strains of this tragedy that can come to pass — and have, within my memory — is that this person’s elevation to the position of power and/or privilege has nothing to do with competence. In fact, in many cases it has to do with the opposite. In the case of the “acutely aware that they are doing very little to fulfill others” it is an issue with lack of productivity, and consequently, lack of the hard-knocks, hands-on knowledge that would develop naturally if they’d spent more of their lives being productive people. And this would apply to President Obama, as well as to many of the public-sector bureaucratic-hack lifelong-lawyers-or-less…read that as unproductive people…in His cabinet.

I think these people have holes in their lives that they can’t fill. You might say they’ve been visited by Scrooge’s three spirits, and are more bothered than they’re willing to admit that, if they were to be abducted by aliens tonight, or die in their sleep, they wouldn’t be missed. Ah, maybe by family & friends. But for all the influence they hold, I think they understand there’s nobody anywhere saying “Thank goodness [blank] handled this problem, it could have gone so much worse.” Not unless they’re paid to say that. Nobody really means it.

It isn’t possible, because these people have been selected for their competence — at a great assortment of entirely empty and meaningless talents, like delivering speeches in front of teleprompters. Giving bullshit excuses to Congress why certain papers should not be produced, and making it sound convincing. Squinching up the eyebrows in just the right way. Wearing a suit well. Saying things like “make no mistake,” “let me be clear,” “uh,” and other such gems in such a thoughtful, sonorous way.

Not doing a Goddamn thing to make anything any better, anywhere. Just putting on good television drama for drooling idiots, that is their area of expertise, and in mid-life they have achieved a new level of self-awareness of it and it has left them unfulfilled. They’ll never admit it, but they have a festering jealousy against the Henry Reardens who came up with new metal alloys that can change the world for the better.

There are those people, and then there are the Kennedy Family people, the Cindy Sheehans, et cetera. Hillary Clinton, for example, is not famous for having any of her close relatives die, but she did have an unfaithful husband…I guess they’re still married, I dunno, don’t care, wouldn’t be surprised if they’re not. Nobody’s asking. The Clintons are to be granted complete privacy in this matter at all times, in all respects, save for one thing: The marriage betrayal is Hillary Clinton’s only qualification, on the entire planet, for anything. It is the only visible way in which she is even remotely exceptional. No really, stop it already with the “intelligent” schtick, she’s lauded because her husband went tomcattin’ around and no other reason, and everyone knows it.

There are many other such examples, since I’ve essentially defined this sequence of events eight times. In truth, I cannot claim authoritative knowledge about it, I’m still in a process of observing it, and mulling it over. The four strains that are under the categorization of “Everybody else wants them to” are all puzzles, to me…I do not understand the adrenaline that drives the third-party, which is everybody else who lives in the community. And that applies to Kip’s Ma, she did not become Soybean Dictator just because she thought it would be a great idea. The nation as a whole pushed for it; the other leaders, as well as the citizens toiling away under the yoke. I don’t completely understand how this works. It seems to have something to do with guilt. Guilt makes people say “aw, that person over there who isn’t qualified to do anything and everyone knows it…let’s put that person in charge of something that has a direct impact on us all, from which we cannot escape.” This must be something that just doesn’t apply to me, like I’m missing something. Must be part of some brain cortex I’m missing — again — like, this is why everyone else seems to think Top Gun and Star Trek IV are good movies. I’m just not picking up the signal. I’ve never shared in this sentiment so I don’t understand how it works, but work it does. Let’s make Teddy Kennedy President, it’s his turn…stuff like that.

But then the people who fall for that, will turn around at breakneck speed and start denouncing someone else as unqualfied — and, from all the evidence we will see made available in that turn of events, it seems they are adhering to my definition of that word, not theirs, as they so insist…

I suggest it be re-defined as “calling things what they really are.”

More specifically, “calling things what they are without a bunch of bullshit euphemisms.”

The danger and the known harm, here, too, are obvious…again, I’m feeling a certain pang of self-perceived foolishness stooping to the level where I type the words in that point it out. We start to systematically fill these high positions that demand “qualified” people…with known liars. We engage in and sustain a pattern of reserving meaningful influence, for the exclusive use of those who we know should not have any.

Do I need to type in what comes next? That this is a bad thing and we need to stop it? I have the impression I do not; this seems to be one of those situations where everyone & his dog consciously knows what is right & wrong, and for reasons unknown and unexplored, we have this definable, documented and familiar tendency to fail to follow through.

Discreetly buried in the ‘Global Business’ section of the New York Times:

Torsten Emmel… was on the verge of breaking the law. Mr. Emmel’s crime: Setting a placard on the sidewalk outside his shop advertising that he would stay open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. It was, after all, Mother’s Day.

But a city inspector noticed the sign and warned Mr. Emmel that it was illegal to stay open so long on a Sunday. Close earlier or be fined, the inspector said.

It was a lesson in how, despite its vaunted industrial sector, the German economy suffers from some of the same overregulation and sclerosis usually associated with much more troubled European countries…

Thank Allah it could never happen here.

Alongside [Germany’s] export juggernaut… is another, creakier economy that operates well below its potential and holds back not only Germany but the rest of Europe, some economists say.

This economy is overregulated, intended to insulate insiders from competition and deeply resistant to change. Though Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, often harangues countries like Spain, Italy and Greece to become more competitive, the German economy features some of the same flaws that they do, including protected professions and zoning laws that favor existing businesses over new ones.

“Germany has what I would call a dual economy,” said Andreas Wörgötter, a senior economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris.

“On one side, we have this very dynamic, innovative, competitive and refreshingly unsubsidized export sector,” he said. “On the other side, there is a much less glamorous services sector which depends on barriers to entry, subsidies and not developing and reaching out for new activities.” …

Again, something we will never have to worry about. [bold emphasis from S&L]

Gets more interesting as you skim further down…so click that puppy open and RTWT.

First, the clip, which Mike Simone put under my explanation of the Morgan Ten Dollar plan. It’s got bad words & junk in it so don’t play it at work or in front of your sweet old auntie…

What’s the ten dollar plan? We take a breather from this nonsense about “make the millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share” — and we go the other way. That’s supposed to be heartless and cruel and unrealistic because people down at the lean end don’t have anything to spare…so…we settle for ten bones a year. From everyone save for those who really don’t have a livelihood. The sick and infirm who lie in hospital beds waiting to be cared for, kids who aren’t old enough to make any loot. But if you’re sashaying on in to a grocery store on a regular basis (or riding your little taxpayer-funded electric scoooter) and exchanging some kind of liquid asset for food items, you pay the ten dollars & up. It’s a guaranteed minimum.

That’s net. So these so-called “credits” that, oopsie oh my lookie here, end up crediting more than the so-called “tax liability” of the “taxpayer” so we have all these people getting a check just for breathing air, by implication, those are gone.

That would make the plan hard to sell. So what. Gay marriage is pretty hard to sell — we don’t want it. But it’s a reality because some advocacy groups have been working very hard at it. It’s much more worthwhile to work hard at getting everyone truly involved, with skin in the game, than to re-define marriage.

I would expect the payroll departments of the employers would come up with some higher level of annual pay, beneath which they would not withhold anything…let’s say, fifteen thousand a year. So you make less than that, it’s still a progressive tax scheme, nothing’s been withheld so here comes a bill from Uncle Sam — ten dollars. Sit down and write a check. You heard President Obama, we all need to sacrifice…so whip it out. This study makes mention of some 46% of households paying zero income tax, or expecting a refund…some 76 million “units.” So we have a new revenue stream of 760 million dollars, plus whatever’s being spent currently on “refunds” or checks sent out to settle a negative federal tax liability.

Yeah yeah, I know. They neeeeeeeeeed the refund and/or the ten dollars. Bollocks, I say. This country neeeeeeeeeeeds to do whatever is necessary to avoid what now, with our present course unaltered, is a certain destiny: A statistical majority, someday soon, paying nothing into the kitty and therefore given no incentive at all to vote against yet more gimme programs. Which means dictatorial control by the moocher class, cloaked by a phony-baloney fig leaf “voting” process…the outcome of that process absolutely certain…just like playing a game of poker with a stacked deck.

We can’t afford it.

The fact of the matter is, there would be weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. Page B1 of every newspaper in every metropolitan area with a quarter million people living in it, or more…some sad sack snivelling into a microphone about what dreadful shape their household is gonna be in when that awful Morgan Freeberg plan hits. And the media will play it up — some of the pain will be genuine — but you know what? That makes for a good argument against additional spending.

And that argument will have always been applicable — it will just be a different class of people feeling the pain. There will not be any arguments about why or how this would be inappropriate…there will be lots of people wanting to make such an argument, but the argument is not there to be made, so they’ll just talk a lot about pain, pain, pain.

Well, we have pain from the government spending too much money. Look at Greece. We’re headed there. Does that look pain-free to you?

These babies being born today, who owe thousands and thousands of dollars the second their cords are cut, cannot be interviewed.

My plan raises less than a billion dollars. That’s about a tenth of a percent of a one-year Barack Obama deficit. So it doesn’t cure that…but that is not the point. Sound engineering has to do with going to the root of the problem, and the root of this problem is people having a say about our spending policies without having skin in the game. So — if we don’t want to disenfranchise people from voting, which is a more than decent alternative solution if we don’t like this plan, we go the other way and make sure everyone has skin in the game.

One, or the other. Or certain economic disaster. Those are your three choices, there is no fourth…and I didn’t make it that way.

Lady bartender over in the UKBagnolo, Italy is being a floozie. On purpose. And I mean, by this, a complete floozie. Big ol’ patches of skin left bare by her incomplete attire, not even bothering with the old worn-out routine of “What, this old thing, just something I threw on” — wallowing in the extra attention and the extra business.

Butterface female mayor with the upside-down Rosie O’Donnell smile (what is it with that look??) is fit to be tied, and is first among the married females putting their husbands on probation from ever stepping foot inside that bar. Oh sweetie, I’ll bet you’re just a joy at parties. You forgot the now-traditional hyphenated name, though.

It is so entertaining…

Now women in the small northern Italian town of Bagnolo Mella have declared Le Cafe out of bounds to their menfolk – and 34-year-old Miss Maggi has become a national celebrity.

Yesterday she was a guest on the Italian equivalent of This Morning and said: ‘I don’t see what the problem is – it’s just a bit of harmless fun.

‘If the guys come here what can I do?

‘I know I have upset the women but that’s not my problem.

‘It’s not my fault if guys want to come and have a drink in my bar.’
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Several wives from the town have been on TV to complain. One said: ‘It is outrageous and should not be allowed.

‘This town is quiet and respectable. Now we are known across the whole country because of the little amount of clothing this barmaid is wearing to serve drinks.

‘The women in town are not very happy and we have complained to the council.’

The floozie is right, of course. She knows she’s upset the wives. And it is not her problem.

Not sure what to make of these wives “banning” their husbands from going to the bar. My lady and I had a talk about what would happen if one of us were to “ban” the other from going someplace…eh…dunno. Neither one of us was able to relate to it much. Like uh, whatever. Even the classic foot-stomping how-dare-you drama is beyond us. Nice brain-fart, cupcake…don’t wait up. But neither one of us would “ban,” so it wasn’t much even by way of hypothetical exercise…

I see there are some battleaxes stuck in equal-opportunity mode, wondering what the dudes would say if the wives found an equal-and-opposite place where the sexy male bartenders showed off their wares. Answer: Dudes don’t care…and it isn’t an “if”…WTF do you think Twilight movies are all about. Somewhere, the notion seems to have become popular that it’s a marital obligation for each husband to make each wife feel like she’s the sexiest Venus who ever stepped foot on the globe, ever, twenty-four hours a day. That’s nuts…

Which brings me to the latest recipient of the Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award…Chris in NYC 2/23/12 6:56:

First off, any man that allows his wife to ‘ban’ him from going to a bar of his choice needs to go to the doctor and have his balls reattached. Secondly, any wife that feels threatened by this needs to spend a little more time off the sofa and more in the gym.

The first and foremost purpose of government is to create government jobs. Going back to the early days of American history a time honored tradition of newly elected politicians was to obtain positions for their friends, their nephews and assorted cousins…There are only so many idiot cousins you can hire to stamp papers and frown at things until you have to create an entire new department and then a division and then an agency to give them something to do. And that leads to budget drains and an expansion of government authority that interferes with the lives of people who work for a living.
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Unfortunately like rabbits, idiot cousins lead to more idiot cousins. Corruption doesn’t stop at a set line, it pushes as far as it can, and when a man with some big ideas gets hold of it, then bar the door because it’s DOE/EPA/HUD/DOL time.

The idiot cousins are satisfied to think small. Their ambitions reach as high as a government salary for doing nothing and a few taverns and ladies of the evening to spend it on. A hundred thousand of them can be a problem, but a million of them organized under a creed that has set out to seize power using an unelected bureaucracy is one of those moments when a society must realize that its corruption has become a liability to its own survival.
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The parable of the industrial age is that of the man who turns on a machine that won’t stop. The modern nightmare begins and ends with the question, “What if we can’t stop what we’re doing?” While this question has been applied to such diverse areas as factories, nuclear weapons and mass culture, it’s rarely directed at government. Not government as a vehicle for exploring the bomb, the surveillance state or any of the trendy abuses of authority– but government itself. What we might ask will happen if the machine doesn’t turn off, if government just doesn’t stop growing?
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The very inflexibility of the idiot cousins guarantees their tenure. The more they fail, the more of them are needed. If we spent X amount of money to achieve Y without achieving it, then next time we must spend X+2. It’s the linear mechanical logic of the idiot who can only think in terms of tackling every problem with more resources until it finally cracks. If our last machine didn’t do it, then our massive EDUTRON 2000 which is twice as big and costs twice as much will surely educate all our children properly.
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A machine of ten million human parts is far dumber than any single human being. It is far less competent, far less capable and far more cruel. It will fail at all but the simplest tasks because it has no soul, it has no conscience, it has no mind and it has no common sense. Its very operation creates more problems than it can hope to solve. It is not a solution. It and its operators, the idiot cousins who fill its metal chambers, are the problem. They are our problem.

If anything, his television-watching has gone downhill. Now he watches Spongebob Squarepants and Hannah Montana — albeit with his daughters (a fact that calls into question his fathering ability but it is a step above having them hear Jeremiah Wright’s racist and anti-American rants).
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For example, when Obama’s experts assembled to discuss the scope and intricacies of the stimulus bill, Barack Obama was out of his depth. He was “surprisingly aloof in the conversation” and seemed “disconnected and less in control.” His contributions were rare and consisted of blurting out such gems of wisdom as “There needs to be more inspiration here!” and “What about more smart grids” and — one more that Newt Gingrich would appreciate — “we need more moon shot” (pages 154-5).

[Ron] Suskind writes:

Members of the team were perplexed…for the first time in the transition, people started to wonder just how prepared the man at the helm was.

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There was a revealing New York Times report during the 2008 campaign that portrayed him as a faculty member at the University of Chicago Law School who refused to have intellectual repartee with other teachers. He would just walk right by other academics who were chatting about the law. There seems to be a pattern of someone who wants to avoid having his intellect scrutinized (tellingly, of course, he never completed a single work of legal scholarship). Is he fearful of revealing that he is not the grand intellect that besotted journalists have proclaimed him to be? Is this why he is tethered to the teleprompter? Do his handlers know something we do not?
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Despite his early boast that “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors,” the reality is far different than the claim. That might explain why he just decided to stop receiving daily economic briefings early in his presidency, despite the pain and suffering that millions of Americans have experienced during his reign, and why he would just walk out on Stephen Chu, his energy secretary, after only a few slides had been shown (the rudeness punctuated with “Steve, I’m done”) that explained the complexities of the BP oil spill? After all, when one “knows more about policy” than mere mortals, who needs to waste one’s time with experts — even Nobel Prize-winning scientists?

Why should taxpayers even fund experts when we have an omniscient president making up fact-free policy? Perhaps we should just lay off thousands of people who toil away in the federal government trying to find facts. American taxpayers can just rely on Barack Obama.

Indeed, a good rule of thumb to judge Obama is to take his boast, reverse it, and then apply it to Obama. He seems out of his depth when discussing policy, so he avoids press conferences and becomes irate during the rare times a non-fawning journalist poses a challenging question to him. Or he is just reduced to “gibberish,” as Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson described his answer to ABC News’s Jake Tapper over a question regarding his broken promise to reduce debt.
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Did he not do his research or ask experts when he violated, for example, agreements made with Israel regarding settlements? Or seek counsel when he broke agreements with East European allies to station missiles on their land as part of his feckless reset with Russia? Or violated the War Powers Act by waging war in Libya?

Perhaps ignorance is bliss — as blissful as a sunny day on the fairway.

Obama fans who find racism behind every criticism of Obama, are more blind than blind; they do not know what they do not know. They advertise their ignorance with every breath, most effectively when they think they’re showing off how smart they are — and have absolutely no idea that this is what they’re doing. They remind me of the blonde insisting her laptop doesn’t need to be plugged in to recharge because it’s wireless…you idiot!

Obama is confronted by not quite so much hatred, as fatigue; we respond the way we do not because He is alien to us, but because He is familiar. Those among us who can offer any kind of work history have seen this before: The big boss is in some endless quest for a way to set Himself apart, to distinguish Himself, by means of forceful speech, personal charisma, having the right friends, and other such meaningless flim-flammery and flair that has nothing whatsoever to do with accomplishing a task efficiently and well.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: My biggest problems with Obama, I’d still have if I agreed with Him about every little observation, every little decision about what to do; He just plain sucks. He goes on vacations, plays a lot of golf, comes back, He raises funds for His political party, He appears now & then in some forum in which He can be assured the questions are purely softball. If He gets a question that’s the least bit hostile, or even unanticipated, He throws this kind of a hissy fit as if the problem all belongs to the person who asked the question that shouldn’t have been asked. Then He pops up somewhere else, drops some rehearsed speech full of meaningless tidbits like “millionaires and billionaires flying around on their corporate jets,” then hauls His millionaire ass onto, uh, what could be called a corporate jet? — and disappears again to go play some golf.

Why mince words? He was elected to get hold of a lot of public money for His friends and make it look good. If He loses this next election the operation will still have been a success; we’re effectively voting on whether or not to make it a bigger one. It’s no more complicated than that.

Which, in a way, is a saving grace because that would mean His foreign policy decisions are not designed to diminish & ultimately destroy His country. They’re just happening to have that effect. But in truth, He and His friends really don’t give a damn one way or another.

Let Me Be Clear: That is the charitable view of Obama’s stewardship. There are those who would disagree with me about it, and insist I’m being way too kind.

In a week when much of the national media attention on former Sen. Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign focused on his views on contraception, the Gallup tracking poll showed Santorum’s support among women increasing by 12 points, vaulting him into a 10-point lead among women over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Time to get myself in trouble.

I believe women, by & large, have a lot of trouble making themselves heard when they perceive they are in the minority among — whatever. Especially among other women. They have trouble with this that men do not have. I see men who perceive they are in the minority among…conservatives, liberals, small-government libertarians, legalize-drugs libertarians, greenies, commies, pinkos, peaceniks, something called “neocons,” Obamabots, moonbats, Paulbots, Romneybots, Santorumbots, Newtbots, you name it. Very few among us are shutting our mouths when we perceive we are in the minority…even when we should.

Women, I think, very often fall into the trap of the dog being wagged by the tail. Some among them have become experts at the fine art of sounding loud even when you know damn good and well you’re in the minority. And the rest of the women are all too often intimidated by this. Here’s a great example: The notion that our economic suffering is linked to a deterioration of our values, this is not a male-only notion at all.

Admittedly, I do not know too many women who are opposed to gay marriage. But I can find quite a few of them for you, who agree with what I think about it, that it’s a complete waste of time and a deliberate distraction, it’s being artificially injected into the nation’s political discussions as a way of propping up an incumbent president whose policies have failed.

Conventional wisdom is that we have to run screaming away from Rick Santorum, arms flailing overhead, at risk of losing the chick vote.

Reality, as it often does, rises up to challenge the conventional wisdom. Hey, some women are mothers. When you’re a mother and you’re spending time and effort and energy and going through no small amount of angst to teach your kids the right values — at some point, you’re not just f00kin’ around anymore, you want the lesson to stick. No, I don’t think they leave it all up to the Dad to bellyache away about too much profanity on cable teevee. I think the women are worried about it; I think the women who are not Moms yet, but hope to be soon, are worried about it too.

No, women do not explode into hysterical rage when they see something reminiscent of the fifties; they do not go into meltdown at the sight of a jukebox or a poodleskirt. Or a Bible. That is, mostly, a fiction. Let’s call it an exaggeration. You can back it up with a few isolated examples, but they are the exception, not the rule.

My point is not that Rick Santorum is sitting on a mountainous reserve of feminine power. My point is that the power he does have here, is significant, if for no other reason than because it is well hidden. It isn’t fringe-kooky whackjob stuff, it’s moderate women who are tired of the way things are going and, like the men, are willing to do whatever it takes to change it.

Update: I remember many, many years ago I had a boss who did what Eric Holder’s doing here…he’d get this look on his face, like what I was explaining to him involved some unreasonably high level of effort on his part to translate it into English. Maybe it was true, but I realized I was past the point of no return when he got that crinkley-eyebrowed look before I had said anything confusing, or even complicated.

There were a couple of times I wanted to just come out and call him on it. Hey…what I just said is pure-plain-vanilla, more or less on par with “nice weather today huh?” Why are you getting this look on your face already? It’s early! Wait until I say something that’s really hard to figure out, we’re not quite there yet. Since he was my boss, I only did this in my dreams…and I sense this exasperation in the Congresswoman.

Holder, along with the entire administration, is wearing out the act. Everything is hopelessly confusing, strange, over-complicated, bigoted…something that cannot be understood and should not be understood. Everything except the softball questions like “So what’s it feel like to be so awesome?”

I’m tiring very quickly of this malarkey about the respect that is due Attorney General Holder due to his lofty position. Like I said over at the Hello Kitty of Bloggin’ about this…

We have two schools of thought at work here. One sez…if the position held by the person is a very high one, you need to show due respect and not ask any uncomfortable questions…the other one sez, if the position held by the person is a very high one, then the trust that has been placed in him is also very high, and he shouldn’t be withholding any answers without a very good reason. I belong to the second one. Wonder if I’m outnumbered.

This is reprehensibly bad judgment…I was watching it thinking, no way is this blog-worthy, yelling at the screen “Not smart!” But then I found it made the cut, plus some, when I realized I hadn’t stopped laughing my ass off since about thirty seconds in.

The rate of unemployment in the United States has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, making the past three years the longest stretch of high unemployment in this country since the Great Depression. Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the unemployment rate will remain above 8 percent until 2014. The official unemployment rate excludes those individuals who would like to work but have not searched for a job in the past four weeks as well as those who are working part-time but would prefer full-time work; if those people were counted among the unemployed, the unemployment rate in January 2012 would have been about 15 percent. Compounding the problem of high unemployment, the share of unemployed people looking for work for more than six months—referred to as the long-term unemployed—topped 40 percent in December 2009 for the first time since 1948, when such data began to be collected; it has remained above that level ever since.

Related: There are some statistics out there that make things look rosier…too bad they’re faked.

Obligatory link. This thing went flying around the innerwebz yesterday and deservedly so. This is what’s heap big busted:

I grew up on the East Coast. For a while, I lived in California.

I was blown away to learn that people could just start bonfires on the beach, whenever they liked.

Now, to be honest, I learned on this when the government was trying to crack down on the practice, but I was blown away at the idea that a private citizen could, in this country, previous to changes in this law at least, simply create a bonfire on the beach and enjoy it. Just because he wanted to.

Then I started to think like this: What kind of a mind-screw did they do on me when I should be surprised that people would be allowed to do this?
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And this is where I begin to get angry:

How much of each of our current mental landscapes are shaped by government such that we internalize the idea that the basic right to be left alone (presuming you’re not destroying other’s property) doesn’t exist?

How much of we come to accept such restrictions as “just normal”?

If you try to open a shop, how many licenses and inspections and certificates do you need?

And we all of course accept that. Of course we cannot perform a lawful trade without first securing the go-ahead of a half-dozen bureaucratic agencies.

I mean, that’s just normal, right? That’s just how it is, right?

Sixty years ago, would we have thought that was normal?

I’m looking for a place to retire. I want to wake up in the morning to the sound of real ocean surf pounding away and smell the salt air…which of course eliminates everything more than a mile or two from the coastlines…and I want to take the beer and wine bottles spent from the night before, and blow them to smithereens, without going anywhere, in my own backhard, with a sidearm. And that, for reasons I don’t quite understand, eliminates the coastal states. What does the ocean have to do with living like a gun-banning nanny-state pussy?

The formula seems to endure pretty consistently: Individual choice prevails if it has something to do with sex, otherwise it doesn’t. Some places in our great union are holding out a little longer, but they’re landlocked. Wonder why that is.

1) Gay marriage is incompatible with Christianity (and for that matter, Islam & Judaism).
2) Gay marriage will end up infringing on religious freedom.
3) Civil unions could confer every “right” that marriage does.
4) Gay marriage may be where it starts, but it wouldn’t be where it ends.
5) Marriage already has enough problems as it is without gay marriage.

I myself am most concerned about items #2 and #5.

Along with a #6: It is a distraction. A deliberate, engineered distraction.

Here we are about to sit in judgment of the most extremist, most polarizing democrat administration since Jimmy Carter, if not before then…nobody can point to a single thing that’s better than it was three years ago, not one thing. Other than bin Laden being dead, anyway. It’s a provably failed run, a stellar example of management-by-salesmen. Not only is the verdict crystal clear, but this time, we simply can’t afford more of what we’ve been seeing…the voters who are intent on sending Obama home, are enthused, the voters who are intent on keeping Him where He is, are not…looks like trouble for the incumbent, to say nothing of the democrats in Congress…

And oh my, lookee here, it’s time for us all to get obsessed about gay marriage again.

What a sham. I guess this stuff works, if it didn’t work they wouldn’t keep doing it.